Steffen Staab (Professor Doctor @ Universität Koblenz)

Bio

Steffen Staab is professor for databases and information systems at the University of Koblenz-Landau where he has founded the Institute for Web Science and Technologies. He is interested in how to deal with the meaning of data be it through means of logics or through means of observing probabilistic patterns. Steffen has co-authored over 300 publications, he is best known for his work in Ontologies and Semantic Web and among the most highly cited authors in this topic area. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics and has been program and general chair of events such as World Wide Web Conference 2012 or International Semantic Web Conference 2008 and 2011.

Activities

Explicit and Implicit Semantics: Two Sides of One Coin

Talk, 15h40 to 17h00, February 27, 2014

Speaker: Steffen Staab

The challenge of understanding data has first been tackled by philosophers and linguistics who asked what it means if people say something. Traditionally, from Aristoteles to Wittgenstein I a logic representation perspective has been pursued that models categories and uses such categories to determine the meaning of words and sentences. In the 20th century empiricists in philosophy and linguistics took a new point of view that understood semantics of language as a social construct and tried to elicit semantics from the observation of language and communication context. In computer science in general and in the semantic web in particular we encounter the need to account for both explicit and implicit semantics of data. This task will give a perspective on this need and outline further research that needs to be accomplished to reconcile the two.